Boulevard of Broken Dreams
by deanwinchesters
Summary: (Isabelle-centric) "Once upon a time, there was a girl who wore leather, daggers, and her heart on her sleeve." slight au, onexshot. for "autumn midnights" at the '14 gge.


**Summary | **(Isabelle-centric) "Once upon a time, there was a girl who wore leather, daggers, and her heart on her sleeve."

**Notes: **For **autumn midnights** at the '14 fanfiction gift giving extravaganza. Hope you like it c:

Mainly cannon, but after the events in "City of Glass" the events are au.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own "The Mortal Instruments", the song "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (by Green Day), the quote at the beginning by J.K. Rowling, or anything else.

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_"Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."_

— J.K. Rowling, _Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire._

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Once upon a time, there was a girl who wore leather, daggers, and her heart on her sleeve. She always wore heels sharp enough to tear a man's heart out and a whip sharp enough to kill, but the physical and mental weapons were something of a shield for the fragile girl.

Fear was her enemy, and fear was her destruction—she was afraid not of demons or death, but of fear itself. The idea of being terrified embedded daggers of ice into her chest, and each fear displayed in front of her was like the ice was finding its way closer and closer to her delicate heart.

She didn't love easily, but when she did she loved with the full of heart. She had always put all or nothing into her every movement, and love was one of the movements that required all her heart. There were a small number of people who she truly loved, but they divided her heart equally, and living without even a single piece of the puzzle would kill her in more ways than one.

She would rather have her heart ripped out than ripped open—love was destruction, and a broken heart for someone who wore their heart on their sleeve was a worse death than torture.

Heartbreak was the most ultimate torture, because in the end, the only option is to live through the pain, and breathe through the missing fragment of your heart.

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Isabelle Sophia Lightwood was afraid of how stupidly _simple_ it was to love.

Falling _in_ love was a harder thing, but loving someone was much too easy for Isabelle. For her, loving someone was caring for them more than you did for yourself, and the feeling happened to her more often than not.

Love was a complicated emotion yet a simple action—she would throw herself in a bullet's path for any member of her family, but the action wasn't fearlessness as she liked to believe it was. It was _cowardly_. She would take the bullet because living with a hole in her heart would be a different kind of death, one too much for the fragile girl to bear.

She didn't have a clue how people could bear the death or a loved one.

Isabelle was well aware that she was Nephillim, and death was common—the life expectancy was half of that of a human—but she was vulnerable to death, and more terrified of someone close to her passing away than she was of her own death.

She tried to imagine someone as close to her as Alec being killed, but the thought was too painful to bear—she shut her eyes as soon as the memory crossed her syrup eyes and willed herself to think about something more gentle on her fragile mind.

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When Isabelle passed by, she was seen as nothing more than a heartbreaker to the judging glances of the people she walked past without glamour. She was watched with smiles by men and frowns by women, but she played the part of a girl who was both toneless and oblivious.

Even the people close to her believed that she would tear a man's heart out upon meeting him, but she was acting always out of fear for herself, for Alec, for a desire to avoid rejection.

Rejection was something difficult to face, but upon avoiding it for half a life, it was bound to be much more detrimental to her sane state of mind.

She knew that she couldn't survive her short life avoiding pain, fear, or rejection, but it was all she knew how to do. She knew how to spin around bullets, and she was an expert at the arts of breaking hearts avoiding confrontation.

She could weave lies out of leather as quickly as they flew into her mind. She was a master of the art of manipulation, and she would need a dozen hands to count the lies she had told to protect herself from heartbreak of any form.

The fall from the fantasy land was harder than she had ever fathomed, and she hoped for the sake of her fragile soul that the first beating would not scar her too deeply.

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Max was the first blow to her weak soul.

When the realization of the young boy's death passed her ears, some shard of her glass heart shattered. Behind her ink eyes was a tear in her heart, but she was too proud to show how deeply she was cut.

She had tossed herself at Simon with an excuse of trying to mend the pain, but she knew the task was impossible—there wasn't such thing as a distraction in her mind from the void of death. No matter what the form came as, there wasn't a way to numb herself from the emptiness that Max left, and the distractions were only present for a moment before the memories came back.

She liked to believe she was in love with Simon, but she feared that she was in love with the distraction he provided. Distractions were safe; they were simple.

When her lips were on those of a man's, she could let her eyes fall closed and pretend that she was all right. She could pretend she was whole, but she knew she wouldn't—she was the shattered pieces of glass left from a smashed vase, swept together and tossed away into an endless downwards spiral.

She loved the distraction, but soon, she found herself to love the distraction in the form of a nerdy boy with glasses, pale skin, and curled hair.

She never wanted to _care _so deeply for the boy because she knew from experience how easy it was to stumble over an ill-defined line between caring for and loving a person. It did not matter how romantic or not the love was—it was love, and all love came under one fragile beating heart.

She was afraid to love yet another person because she knew how painful the wound of heartbreak was, and how deep the scar ran. The scar of a broken heart was permanent and obvious, something like having a cracked heart branded onto the lover.

_Don't love Simon_, she whispered to herself in the lighted hours of the day.

But she did.

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It was impossible to compare the falling out of one love to another. A knife could only run so deep, and Isabelle believed that when the terminal pain was reached, it was impossible to feel anything more ripping.

She supposed that reaching the maximum of the pain she could endure was a good thing, but to her, it wasn't. The height of the pain was like the pressure of a thousand needles being pressed into her at once, and the needles were coming closer and closer to her heart with each torn heartbeat.

Her heart tore when she watched Simon watching Clary. A thousand people would have denied the clear sight to keep themselves going, but Isabelle was nothing if not a masochist. She was intelligent, and with a simple glance she knew that Simon loved Clary too deeply to love anyone else, and his love for the raven-haired girl was a lie he told himself to fall asleep at night.

When she was young, she dreamed to love and be loved in return, but now? She wished to love someone who would not proceed to tear her cracking heart out of her chest and toss it away from her, miles too far to see, for that was what Isabelle felt like. Her figurative heart felt to be hundreds of miles away from her, and she was aimlessly stumbling through the dark to find the love she had lost.

"Once upon a time, I'll be all right." She whispered to herself in the middle of the night, but she knew that the comfort she whispered to herself was only a settling lie to help her bear her seemingly endless days.

The heart was the center of a person's being, and she felt hers crumbling.

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_Keep holding on._

What was there left to hold on to when everything she had was crumbled?

She tried to stand up, to hold on, to grasp whatever ground she had left, but she was constantly falling. She was spinning out, and she hated being out of control—any aspect of her life she was not holding on to was a hell in its own, but the hell was a small box she was trapped inside.

She felt as though she were standing on a ledge, but the ledge was crumbling underneath her weight. Every hammer to her heart was weight on her, and every shatter that fell from her cracked heart was another of the shard of the ledge that had fallen.

She was on a tightrope, but she was swaying, and she was sure she would fall.

She wished she would fall.

When her eyes closed, she imagined the bliss of shutting her life off, but she could not—she was needed by Alec, and he would crack under her absence as she had already broken. Isabelle did not wish the pain on anyone, and the pain falling on Alec was something painful for her to even fathom.

All her life, she had protected her older brother. She had thrown herself at men to take pressure off of him, and she had hidden his secrets with everything she had so that he would be happy. He was sensitive, and broken nearly half as easily as she.

She would be terrified if Alec was as easily breakable as she was, but that was not the case. Alec was able to truly distract himself, and he had ties to people who would never fade, Jace as an example.

Jace burned brightly, but a part of Jace would fade away with Alec's sadness. They were parabatai, and though Isabelle knew that she needed Alec more than Jace did, Jace needed him all the same. Jace needed him in the way that a crippled man needed a crutch—they were as close as blood.

But Jace had Clary, and Isabelle had no one.

If she were to pass, would she truly be missed?

Clary cared for her, but she didn't love her. Jace did in some form, but Isabelle was not enough to break him. Simon loved Clary—always. Alec needed her, but he had a support system behind Isabelle—he had Magnus, a man who loved him. He had Jace, a man like a brother. He had Clary; she would protect him.

He had himself; he was stronger than Isabelle was, and could live using himself as a support system.

She wished to be like Alec, but unlike him, she needed something to hold on to.

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When Alec died, Isabelle had shattered completely.

She remembered watching him die clearly—his blue eyes falling shut haunted her nightmares and attacked her waking hours with a heavy pain that made her want to scream. His too-pale body going limp flashed behind her eyes each time she closed them—the thoughts drilled into her mind whenever she was fragile, and impaled her sanity with only pain.

It was a demon, and though Jace stabbed it moments later, a cut to the chest that was an inch too deep was the fatal blow to Isabelle's heart.

When she had heard his body hit the floor, an inhuman shriek came from her—she did not need to see how deeply he was cut. She _knew_ he was hurt before he had made a noise because she knew him so well, and knew that they were the same in their own entities.

She had fallen towards him to mark his chest with a healing rune, but arms—Jace—restrained her.

Isabelle remembered watching Jace's rune symbolizing their bond, and breaking down into sobs when the ink began to fade.

After that, pain was the only thing she could feel.

The pain was numbing—she found it difficult to breathe when Alec crossed her mind, which was constantly. Her chest tightened when she saw his lifeless body, and the scar of a rune on Jace's chest was too much for her to bear.

There was no one left who cared, no one left who needed her.

But, perhaps that was for the better.

"There's no one left," Isabelle whispered, kneeling on the chilling ground. Her fingers curled around the hilt of a human blade in her pocket, and she tugged the knife out. "There's no one left," She placed the knife so that the blade lightly pressed into her abdomen, "There's no one left.

Her ink eyes shut, and she rammed the silver blade into her abdomen. A gasp escaped her reddened lips, and she choked out a painful cry—the pain was blinding, consuming.

And for once, her mind was not resting on her broken heart.

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**Notes: **Ew sorry this was so terrible :c all of that aside, I hope that this was legible at the very least

Question of the day:

What is your favorite character in "The Mortal Instruments"?

leave a review c:


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